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It’s All In Your Head—Sweet Tooth ‘Circuit’ Discovered

Apr. 2, 2015|365 views

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Do you have a sweet tooth? Do you hanker for gooey goodies? Have
a crush on candy? If so, you’re not alone. Health experts consider
the obesity epidemic to be a major public health threat. For some overweight or
obese people, compulsive overeating and sugar addiction are constant problems.

Like drug addiction, compulsive overeating is a type of reward-seeking
behavior. There’s one important difference, though.
Eating is necessary for survival, while taking drugs is not. Scientists are
concerned that any treatments they may devise to short-circuit this
sugar-addiction circuit may also eliminate the urge to eat at all. That would
be just as bad as overeating oneself to death.

So they were encouraged, recently, when they discovered a neural
pathway in the brains of mice that promotes excessive sugar consumption.
Experiments indicated that this pathway is independent of separate pathways
that ensure that hungry mice feed. By shutting down the sugar addiction
pathway, investigators were able to influence sugar-seeking mice to stop going
out of their way to get sugar. But the same mice didn’t stop eating
altogether.

"Our findings are exciting because they raise the
possibility that we could develop a treatment that selectively curbs compulsive
overeating without altering healthy eating behavior,”
said senior study author Kay Tye, of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, in a press release.

Tye believes these separate food-seeking brain circuits developed
to ensure adequate feeding when resources are scarce. But modern life has
thrown us a curveball. ”We have not yet adapted to a world
where there is an overabundance of sugar, so these circuits that drive us to
stuff ourselves with sweets are now serving to create a new health problem,”
said Tye. “The discovery of a specific neural
circuit underlying compulsive sugar consumption could pave the way for the
development of targeted drug therapies to effectively treat this widespread
problem.”